3 ms·

This abstract: http://www.rrjournal.org/doi/abs/10.2307/3578993 http://www.rrjournal.org/doi/abs/10.2307/3578993 (albeit a bit hard to read if you don't parse

• lutorm 16y ago
  They say it's 0.6-60 Gy. If my calculation is correct, to get a 10Gy dose over ~2.5 years due to the 5.15Mev alphas from Pu239, that would mean they contained 6.7e-8 kg Pu239 / kg body mass, i.e. .06mg/kg body mass. So it's fair to say that it's pretty bad. Unless I dropped a factor N_A or something... ;-)
  • kragen 16y ago
    .06mg/kg is a pretty small lethal dose. That's probably entirely due to the radioactivity. Tetraethyl lead has a lethal dose of something like 1.2mg/kg http://www.inchem.org/documents/pims/chemical/organlea.htm http://www.inchem.org/documents/pims/chemical/organlea.htm which is 20 times higher. But that's organic lead, which is rapidly absorbed; lead oxide is something like 600 mg/kg, ten thousand times higher than the dose you calculated for plutonium. But, in that case we're comparing the ingested dose to the dose absorbed; you'd have to ingest about 150mg/kg of PuO₂ to absorb 0.06mg/kg of it. Also, though, the fatal dose of another heavy metal like lead might be lower than the LD₅₀ reported, because LD₅₀ tests normally don't give the experimental animals several years to die. So, in conclusion, it seems like accurately comparing plutonium poisoning to poisoning by other heavy metals requires more knowledge than I have. Good thing the NRC's on the job.